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Abagail Freemantle
Abagail Freemantle, more commonly known as Mother Abagail (b. 17 January 1882) was a faithful Christian and a key protagonist in The Stand. Biography Early life John Freemantle and his brothers came to Hemingford Home, Nebraska in 1873, buying a homestead with money paid to them as wages for working after the States War by Sam Freemantle of Lewis, South Carolina. John had bested those who would not buy from or sell to black people by purchasing land slowly, little pieces at a time, until he had amassed enough land for his farm. Abagail Freemantle was the youngest child of John and his wife, Rebecca Freemantle, born on the family's farm. First marriage In 1902 Abagail married David Trotts, a black farmhand from near Valparaiso, and many people criticised or made fun of them because David was a quiet and thoughtful man. In December of that year Abagail, three months pregnant with their first child, sang and played guitar in the "white folks' talent show" at the Grange Hall, which was unprecedented given the racism extant in the area; fortunately, however, the performance was enormously successful and she was greeted with thunderous ovation and multiple requests for an encore. Even ninety years after, that was the proudest day of Mother Abagail's life. Over the ensuing years David and Abagail had five children together: four sons and a daughter, Maybelle, who choked to death on an apple in the backyard of the family farm at Hemingford Home; Maybelle was Abagail's only daughter and the only one of her children to suffer an accidental death. David died of influenza in 1913. Later marriages Three years later, Abagail remarried to a forty-one-year-old widower named Henry Hardesty from Wheeler County. Hardesty had seven children from a previous marriage, but all but two had already grown up and left home by the time of his marriage to Abagail. Henry and Abagail had two sons together, before Henry was killed in an accident involving his tractor in 1925. The following year, Abagail married Nate Brooks, Henry's hired man, whom she considered a good husband even if not as good as her first two. They had no children together, and eventually Nate predeceased her as well. Throughout the years, her six sons eventually had a total of thirty-two grandchildren, and those grandchildren went on to have ninety-one great-grandchildren, who had three great-great-grandchildren by the time of the superflu in June 1990. Abagail was a very pious Methodist and scorned both Catholicism and modernism; she refused to install city water at her home despite a severe drought, and argued fiercely against a toilet coming into her house. She did, however, allow her grandson Victor to install a privy for her, and even permitted her relatives Cathy and David to install a television, which she found entertaining. By the time of the superflu, Mother Abagail was old and feeble, missing all of her teeth, with trouble remembering things and using the privy, and had survived all of her children and, it can be assumed, her grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Notes and references